


Human After All, or, the Universal Ineptitude that Comes with Sentience

by obstinateRixatrix



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Meteorstuck, POV Kanaya Maryam, POV Second Person, Retcon Timeline, in that rose is dealing with the aftermath of canon regrettable life choices showed in vriskagram
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-26
Updated: 2017-01-26
Packaged: 2018-09-19 23:51:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9466193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obstinateRixatrix/pseuds/obstinateRixatrix
Summary: Rose, Kanaya, and their date in the retcon timeline





	

**Author's Note:**

> thanks air for reading this over and also cowriting more than one novel-length fanfic with me. also ever since I saw [this comic](http://floralmarsupial.tumblr.com/post/152271308936/) kanaya's It Really Is Such Bullshit has haunted me so, that made it in?? shoutout to that one comic for making that one line that much easier to write

During the length of your extended stay on the meteor’s three-year journey, you’ve become increasingly aware of the fact that Rose is, indeed, human.

Of course, you’ve known all along that she’s _human;_ this awareness isn’t in regards to how alien she is (although that’s also been increasingly obvious), but is instead in the somewhat pedantic terminology that implies the universal ineptitude that comes with sentience. It’s a strange sentiment to have, you think, having an adage that purposefully acknowledges the flaws of your own species. The Alternian equivalent implies quite the opposite; someone who is “a troll after all” is someone who’s proven themselves less fallible than initially perceived.

The human sentiment seems much more sensible, honestly.

In any case, you’ve had more than enough time to amend your initial idolatry of the great heroine TENTACLETHERAPIST, mysterious entity who razed the game with her aggressive initiative and dazzling wit, what with your excruciatingly embarrassing attempts at first contact. You’re long since past the infuriating caricature of incompetence-slash-intelligence that haunted your initial parleys. You’ve come to know Rose Lalonde, who has consistently subverted your two-dimensional assessments with elegant abandon coupled with obnoxious contumacy.

Right now, she is currently engaged in the latter.

It’s a bit of a strange situation, chasing your inebriated crush who ran off after being verbally castigated by your ex-moirail for standing you up on what was apparently a date (!), but she’s so obviously distraught that you can’t just let her abscond without some attempt at damage control. Not to mention, her current lack of inhibitions could cause even more problems for Future Rose than she (current) has already enmired her (future) in. So you follow her, except, maybe not _too_ close, allowing for a legitimate chance at escape in case she actually doesn’t want to talk and your attempts are exacerbating a problem instead of ameliorating it. You’re just calling out well-meaning but ultimately useless reassurances and platitudes right up until the equation of impaired motor reflexes and a ludicrous amount of stairs arrives at its inevitably disastrous solution.

“Fuck!” she yells as she careens backwards, and you don’t know if it’s your own panic or your rainbow drinker reflexes that get you there in time to catch her, but thankfully, there is a minimal amount of blunt force trauma all around. So that’s a success, of a sort. She also has her arms wrapped around you, and even though your blood pusher no longer beats, some vestige of that sensation thrums through you, an echo of late nights spent lying in your recuperacoon and thinking yourself to distraction. Unfortunately, there’s a different and much more apparent biological tell that broadcasts exactly how affected you are by the sudden proximity, and judging by how Rose flinches, gripping at her head, it’s probably not helping in your quest to make her feel less like a monumental testament to human catastrophe.

“Sorry,” you blurt out, carefully separating yourself once you’re sure she’s able to stand without assistance. “I’m sorry, are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m… look, don’t appal—  _apologize,_ I’m the one whosh… fuck,” she repeats, lowering herself to the floor. Maybe she’s limiting the potential for motor-related catastrophe. Smart. You take a seat next to her. Rose, she’s… scrambling for words in a way you’ve never seen, so maybe the best course of action is to wait for her to gather her thoughts.

“I can’t believe I almost died because of a _shoe.”_

Well. Not what you were expecting, but okay.

“It’s a good thing conditioner immortality is all about this cosmic scale of good and evil decided arbitrarily by some unfathomable arbi— arbitraitor, because I’d really like to avoid being the first god to meet her divine demise by tripping over her feet. It’s ridiculous; these clothes exist specifically for me by the game’s design, shouldn’t a show that fits perfectly _not_ fall off? What’s the point of being _able_ to die from a clumsy wardrobe malfiction? What kind of bullshit is this?”

There’s not much you can say, except, “It really is such bullshit.”

She huffs out a subdued laugh, almost soft enough to be a sigh. “There’s a lot of bullshit going on, but it’s mostly from me. I’m shuh— I’m _sorry_ ,” she forces out, enunciating the word with concentrated effort. “Both for standing you up, and for the whole…” She gestures towards the stairs. “I was warned, but unfortunately, precognition means nothing in the face of being fucking hammered.”

“I didn’t mind the latter. Or at least, saving you from it,” you clarify, because there really was only a very specific thing you didn’t mind, “but I’m a little mystified as to why you did not simply float.”

Rose sinks her face into her waiting palms. _“Why didn't I float,”_ she mutters to herself with a mortified sobriety. You lay a hopefully comforting prong on her shoulder, a show of solidarity in the agony of retrospective regret.

“Rose,” you start, after what’s hopefully been a long enough time for shared reflection, “there is clearly something plaguing you, and I’m sorry it took Vriska’s intervention for us to realize.”

“No, don’t say that. This entire situation is a dumpster fire I’ve lit for myself.”

“Still, if we were more responsive to what has evidently been a nascent issue for some time now, perhaps the dumpster fire would be less of an all-consuming inferno. I’m afraid my bias did little to help the situation.”

She’s shaking her head, the tease of a slight grin tugging at her mouth, so at least the quip was successful at lightening the mood. “Your bias?” She asks.

The room flickers as you struggle to shove down the geyser of embarrassment that seems to characterize your life. What is it about Rose Lalonde that makes you immediately regret a fair amount of what comes out of your mouth. “It’s not important,” you say, instead of recounting the mortifying interpersonal bungles of your youth. No time for that, it’s time to ask what you probably should've asked from the start instead of making the long ill-conceived trek around potential conciliatory blunders. “Rose, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” she insists, “nothing serious.”

“Past experience has made it abundantly clear that our respective scales of severity are not quite synchronized. At least, not when the subject is closely related to you and your life choices.” You have pages of pesterlogs to prove it. At this point, you could probably write a novel on Rose Lalonde’s Ironically Poor Foresight. “Even if you don’t think the problem warrants acknowledgement, I would recommend talking to someone about it. If not me, I know for a fact that there are several individuals on this meteor that consider you a close friend, no matter what they might say. At the very least, I have it on good authority that the Mayor is a fantastic listener.”

“Careful Kanaya, your sincerity is showing.”

Joke's on her, you refuse to let light-hearted banter deflect your really big important gesture of understanding and empathy. “I wasn’t trying to hide it.”

“No,” she sighs, strangely acerbic but unmistakably fond, “I suppose you weren’t. I’m just… I’m not who you think I am, Kanaya.”

It’s hard to parse what Rose is trying to convey with that admission. She certainly can’t be claiming to secretly be Her Imperial Condesce, here to cull everyone on this meteor, so there’s probably some deeper meaning to it. “I find that hard to believe,” is probably a safe enough answer to give.

“I’m not who anybody thinks I am!” She almost upends herself with the force of her gesticulations, far more animated than you’ve ever seen from her. “I fully recognize how melodramatic the sentiment sounds, especially at the apex of adolescence, a stage of life notorious for teenage angst, but I assure you it’s an artifice of my own design. As it turns out, emotional incompetence isn’t a sign of high intellect! It’s a sign of emotional incompetence! What _should_ be hard to believe is how anybody puts up with all these pointless mind games I’ve built my entire personality on. How did any of you deal with sober Rose? All she does is throw up ridiculous obfuscations for any hint of emotion she might express. Although, considering I can actually pronounce ‘obfuscations’ now, I suppose I am the sober Rose. She’s me. Turns out, she’s not nearly as smart as she claims.”

“Rose you’re not—”

“I’ve seen how bad this can get,” she interrupts, overcome by some sudden momentum of emotional transparency. “I’ve seen it across several timelines, and I’ve avoided it until now. It’s like gleefully prancing in front of an oncoming train. And yet…” She leans her head heavy into her prongs, as if attempting to stave off the onset of an inevitable headache. “It appears the only sincerity I express can be found at the bottom of a bottle. I’ve spent so much time constructing this smug, passive-aggressive, pseudo-intellectual personality, and now it’s all I am. All that I’m capable of. I can’t be nice without someone reading into it, but beyond that, I just can’t be nice. I can’t be thoughtlessly benign, except when I’m less myself. The world seems so much softer when your senses are dulled.”

“Rose, I—”

“You didn’t even know it was a date!” It bursts out of her with all the force of a high-powered explosion. “I thought I was being coy, but I was just making an ass of myself! How hard is it to walk up to a pretty vampire-alien and ask her out! Apparently it’s harder than distilling and recombining notionally reducible concepts into alchemizable spacewizard booze!”

Well. That was certainly an enlightening piece in the puzzle of Rose Lalonde’s vague machinations, but it’s a piece you are going to ignore for now because being a good friend takes priority.

 _“Rose,”_ you try again, this time with enough authority that she lets you proceed unimpeded. “Since when have you been confined by any expectations? I seem to recall a certain someone being entirely uncooperative during the entirety of her session.”

“As it turns out, despite my smug assurance I actually knew shit-all about what the fuck was going on. It was only by the whims of Paradox Space that we bumbled into some… not even a victory, just an evasion of failure. I was barely involved in that anyway. Jade, she… she’s the one that actually set anything in motion. At least, in a meaningful way. I just threw a tantrum and got myself killed. Against your advice, I might add.”

“A gross simplification that discredits many vital contributions you’ve made to our evasion of failure, but if that is the angle you’ve chosen to approach this from, maybe you’ve learned to listen to me.” Point, Maryam. “You’re over-complicating things,” you say.

“I thought I was simplifying them.”

“Don’t interrupt, it’s my turn to talk.” It’s a soft near-factitious chastisement, but Rose holds up her prongs in concession which means you’re good to go. “I used to think that we all had an important job to do. And we do, but perhaps not in the way I thought. It’s not that there is only one great thing each of us are capable of, but more that our importance is grounded in the inherent characteristics we gravitate towards in a way that doesn’t exact penance for every mistake we will inevitably stumble into. And these characteristics aren’t static; they are quite capable of shifting as different needs are met and as different personal revelations are explored.”

You’re rambling too much. You should stop that.

“I suppose what I’m saying is that the idea of ‘importance’ is conflated with a concrete measure of consistent success, but being important isn’t what makes Rose important, Rose is important simply because she is Rose. And if Rose needs time to process and cope with the trials of adolescence, made more complex by the dubiously infallible machinations of an unkind universe, that’s important too. You aren’t confined to being just one iteration of Rose. You’re much too important for that.”

“In any case,” you continue, still trying to wrangle your thoughts to the topic at hand, “if you’re worried about failing expectations, or falling into expectations, why not try open defiance? A conscious subversion on your own terms, without the assistance of your human soporifics.”

You look at her with a resolute candor, and maybe it’ll be enough to get your feelings across. “If you want to be sincere, all that matters is that you are sincere. Everyone else will adjust accordingly.”

“It’s that easy?” she asks, at some inscrutable intersection between sarcastic and sincere.

“I wouldn’t call it easy, but it’s a start.”

The two of you sit in silence, ample time for you to reexamine everything you’ve said and analyze exactly what could be misconstrued and where you could have been the slightest bit less incoherent, but after what feels like an eternity, she lets out a breath.

“You’re right. And maybe… now would be a good start.” She takes your hand in a very deliberate manner, which sends a brief stab of some panic-affection amalgamate through you before leveling into a fluttering sensation of vertigo. “Kanaya, thank you for being a good friend. I sincerely appreciate it, and also, I sincerely like you. Like-like, if you want to continue the motif of embarrassingly stereotypical adolescent shenanigans.”

“Oh,” you say, hopefully less dazed than you feel. “I had my suspicions, but I am sincerely glad to hear it.”

She laughs, and when she pulls you in for a kiss you’re almost certain you could rival a sun.

**Author's Note:**

> a while ago I wrote [this textpost](http://obstinaterixatrix.tumblr.com/post/152273857034/) and now I finally got around to finishing this fic. just in time!! for my 8 year fanfic publishing anniversary!!!!! haha holy shit I implore you to [check out this post](http://obstinaterixatrix.tumblr.com/post/156341649672/) because I never want anybody to ever labor under the misapprehension that I am anything other than a huge loser who kept throwing herself at the whole writing thing until I got to being a huge loser with better writing. I know on the internet this is like the equivalent of handing y'all a loaded gun and pointing it at my face, but there it is. pull the trigger, and then realize that writing is a craft that is capable of being honed. ya can't get good at something without sucking at it first, so go out there and write yo :V


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